Rachel was startled when a van roared past her on the street and screeched to a stop at the curb, about thirty feet ahead of her. She felt a blast of adrenaline surge through her body, and decided her best move was to keep walking as if nothing were happening. She could carry this off if she avoided making any guilty moves.

Her resolve held up until the men leaping out of the van headed straight for her, their eyes on her. She held up her hands in front of her. "Wait! It's okay, I'm an American citizen. I'm going to the embassy. What papers do you need to see?" She started to reach into her purse for her passport, but thought better of it.

By this time the man in the lead was beside her, quickly clamping his hand around her upper arm, pulling her towards the van. She told herself over and over, stay calm, they can't hurt you, they won't do anything. She managed to keep herself breathing almost normally.

That worked until the man holding her reached into his pocket and pulled out something that made a jingling sound. To her horror, Rachel saw that he was holding handcuffs.

She shook her head violently, her eyes wide. "Hey, no, that's not necessary, I won't fight you. I'll come along... hey, I need that! My passport is in there!" The last was in reference to her purse, which one of the men had jerked out of her hand. By this time the man with the cuffs had taken hold of both her arms and wrenched them behind her back, quickly slapping the cuffs onto her wrists and securing them. Her heart thundered in her chest. She had laughed when a boyfriend had once suggested bondage games, while inwardly shuddering, wondering how any woman could get off on giving up her freedom of movement like that. She loathed the whole idea.

How could it have gone wrong? Obviously the police knew what had happened, had been ready for it before it happened -- how else could they reacted so quickly? They must have been following the girl, the one who'd put whatever it was in her purse. They'd known all about her, and waited to see who her accomplice was.

One of the men opened the back of the van, and the man who had cuffed Rachel now pushed her towards the compartment the opened door revealed. She tried to say calmly, "Okay, I'm going in, I'm going in. Can I have my purse back, please?" Without a word, from any of the men, the one holding her shoved her inside the van and slammed the door shut. Checking quickly, she saw there was no handle on the inside. A partition with metal bars separated the back compartment from the rest of the van. Okay, fine, she thought with a sigh. I guess civilized behavior isn't the norm here in police/civilian relations. As the men jumped back in the van and the engine roared to life, she sat on the floor of the compartment and wriggled back to lean against the side wall, drawing up her knees, twisting her hands behind her ineffectually against the cuffs.

With nothing else to do, as the van pulled away from the curb, she examined her surroundings. The compartment had a bare metal floor, with patches of dirt encrusted at various points. There was a smelly puddle that looked like vomit in one corner, and she moved away from it.

Rachel had made Mandy promise, this morning, that if Rachel didn't come back by late afternoon, Mandy would pack up all their stuff ready to go, leave it in the room and walk straight to the embassy, with her passport. There was no danger in that -- Mandy wouldn't be carrying anything incriminating. She would tell the embassy officials that the Irkhetnian government might be holding an American citizen. The embassy could smooth out the deportation proceedings, and call Rachel's dad to let him know what had happened. They'd even pick up their bags at the hotel. Everything would be taken care of. Rachel would meet up with Mandy at school, after her deportation. She wondered how long that would take. She knew some of these ex-Soviet republics had immobile bureaucracies more rigid than anything in the U.S. Doubtless there would be court hearings and reams of paperwork. She sighed. She hoped she could be home in time for the start of classes, but didn't feel sure.

With time to sit and think, she felt a little calmer, in spite of the discomfort and indignity of the handcuffs. This hasn't been fun, she thought, but it'll be over soon, and I'll be home. She smiled. Here was an adventure she would relish telling all her friends about. People would be amazed. She might even make Mandy wish she'd done it herself.

Sitting in the front seat beside the driver, Yevgeni felt Alexei poke his shoulder. He turned and blinked at the sight of Alexei's face gone pale. Alexei handed Yevgeni the mobile phone. "Ask him where the shawl lady went."

Yevgeni barked the question into the phone, listened a moment, then went pale himself. He shouted, "She went where?? The private quarters? Are you sure??" He listened again, and closed his eyes, saying to no one in particular, "Oh, this isn't good." Into the phone, he asked, "Did you get a picture of her? A clear one that shows her face? This is really important." After another pause to listen, he sighed. "Okay. Take that image to the computer guys. You know who to tell them to compare it with." He shook his head again, and muttered a heartfelt "Shit" under his breath.

He added it up in his head. Walking around in disguise like that. Being the only person who'd had any physical contact with the girl in the red blouse since Red had left her hotel. And he'd seen the exchange, with his own eyes. There wasn't any room for doubt that the girl in the shawl had been the contact the red babe had intended to meet. But if she was who she seemed to be...

Oh, Lord, he thought.

Rachel decided she very much preferred her earlier ride. At least in the police van she'd had enough room to stretch out her legs.

She was relieved the trial was over, assuming that's what it had been. There had at least been a dour man wearing a robe sitting behind an elevated table, who surely must have been a judge. Rachel had tried to ask who would be representing her, and demanded to speak to someone from the embassy. She never found out whether anyone had even understood her, but she did learn she wasn't supposed to be speaking: at a signal from the judge, a police officer had reached into his pocket and produced a huge rubber ball with leather cords attached. Before Rachel understood what was happening, he had shoved the ball into her mouth, still opened for shouted protests, so that it lodged behind her teeth, almost impossible to spit out even if the cords had not then been tied around her head to secure it. With her hands still cuffed behind her, she was unable to do anything about the gag. She sat back, fuming, her heart pounding, listening to the judge's conversation with the arresting officers in a language that sounded like Russian.

Rachel couldn't help squeaking with anger as the officer had dumped the contents of her purse onto a table, picking out from the odds and ends her passport, and an envelope Rachel hadn't seen before -- no doubt it was what the girl in the shawl had snuck into her purse.

The judge, reading the documents that had been in the envelope, appeared to become angrier as he went on, peppering the police officers with questions. Rachel hoped he was mad at them and not her. At last he had made a short speech and banged on the gavel.

Rachel was pulled up from her chair and pushed to a side door of the courtroom, and there handed over to a pair of men who, though uniformed, did not appear to be police -- their uniforms were black rather than the police officers' blue, and of an altogether different style. Probably from a higher level of government, Rachel decided. She was still gagged and handcuffed, and saw no point in fighting them as they led her out of the courtroom, each with a hand firmly grasping her upper arms on either side, and took her out to a vehicle parked behind the building.

It was a van much larger than the one she'd been brought to the station in. She waited patiently as one of the men opened the back door, and gasped when she saw the interior. It consisted of two rows of cages on opposite sides of a narrow walkway, all of them empty at present. Rachel started shaking her head in disbelief as the man pulled open the door of one of the cages and forced her to crouch with a strong hand on her back. Still conscious of being in no position to fight, she scooted into the cramped cage, less than a yard wide in every dimension, and turned to face the front just as he slammed the door of the cage, which locked with a sharp click. Without a word, he jumped down from the back of the van and closed the rear door with a slam. Moments later, the engine started, and Rachel felt the van moving.

That had been two hours ago -- twisting her hands behind her, Rachel was able to get a look at her wristwatch. She had long since given up trying to pull her wrists out of the cuffs or push the gag out of her mouth. She had assumed, at first, they were driving her to the airport to put her on a plane, but she knew the airport wasn't far enough away to justify a drive this long. Must be driving me straight to the border, she decided, and tried to remember which countries might be on the border. Lithuania, maybe? She wished she remembered more about Eastern Europe. Wherever it was, she hoped somebody there spoke English.

She gave up trying to visualize the European map, and concentrated on mentally organizing the list of indignities they had put her through. She swore to herself that no matter how long it took, no matter how many forms she had to fill out or how many government officials she had to talk to, she would make sure no American was treated this way here again.

The road grew more bumpy. Rachel could tell, after another hour, that the van was climbing steeply. The interior of the van was obviously cooling more than the descending sun could account for, the air growing more crisp. Her ears popped. She shivered, and wriggled as much as she could in the cage to keep her circulation going. We're up in the mountains somewhere, she told herself. Maybe the border runs through the mountains -- that's often the case with landlocked countries. Perhaps I'll be across the border soon now. Well, of course, first there would be paperwork to fill out. They'd probably pull up to a border station for that.

At last, to Rachel's relief, the van stopped and its engine was turned off. The silence, after hours of the sound of the grinding, laboring engine, gave her the uncomfortable feeling she had actually gone deaf, so she was relieved to hear the sound of the back door of the van open. One of the black-uniformed men opened her cage and jerked her out of it by her upper arm. She sighed -- being near a bordering country hadn't improved their manners, but she felt cheered to think the unpleasantness was nearly over.

Standing on stiff legs on the ground behind the van, stamping her feet as she shivered in the wind -- though it was late summer, and still daylight, the temperature was too cool for Rachel's light clothing, and she realized she must be even higher up in the mountains than she had imagined -- Rachel had time for a quick look around before the man took her by the arm again and hustled her forward. Though she saw the expected mountains, she was by no means near their tops. Immediately in front of Rachel, to her surprise, stood a helicopter, its blades just beginning to turn. She couldn't see any markings on it, so she couldn't tell which country it was from -- she was still suspecting Lithuania. Going to fly me all the way to their capital, she guessed.

Two men from the helicopter approached her, in uniforms identical to those of the men from the van. Without a word they took her under the arms and began hustling her towards the chopper, its engines now in full roar. Shit, she thought, these are Irkhetnian government police too. I'm not at the border. I guess the chopper will take me there. She bent to avoid the whirling blades as the men threw her, not gently, in behind the front seats of the chopper and then piled in themselves. Despite the rough treatment, she felt a little excited. She'd never been in a helicopter before. This, she told herself, should be fun.

Her eyes grew wide with wonder as she watched the ground drop away and enjoyed the sights of the majestic mountains, the chopper rising quickly amid the grandeur. She hoped she'd remember this sight forever.

The flight was about twenty minutes, climbing to a still higher elevation, and Rachel felt disappointed as the trip ended with the chopper setting down in a small clearing on the side of a mountain. As the men pulled Rachel out, she looked around trying to orient herself. She shivered violently at a sudden gust of wind, wondering how high they were now. She was surprised to see patches of snow on the ground -- in late August! The drop-off from here was not sheer, and there was a pretty pine forest in front of her, gradually descending in elevation as one went outward. The trees were not dense, and through them Rachel could see, at some distance down the slope, what looked like a wall running along the side of the mountain. That struck her as very odd. Her eyes followed the wall and saw that it gradually bent towards the mountain at both ends, eventually vanishing from sight at either end. She wondered whether it could possibly go all the way around the mountain. In any case, she realized she was in an enclosure, though quite a large one. The guards spun Rachel around, and she now saw that there was a large archway in the steep mountain face that looked like the entrance to a cave. Oh, she thought, that'll be kind of neat, walking through a tunnel between one country and another.

Each man grasping her by an arm on either side, they hurried her into the tunnel entrance. The walls narrowed quickly, and she blinked at the sight of a large metal door that barred further progress. The man on her right lifted a phone receiver from its cradle by the door and spoke into it briefly. The door opened after a clicking of locks from within, and the men hustled Rachel inside, into a small chamber. After closing the first door, they opened another door opposite the first, and took her through.

It was much warmer beyond the second door. Rachel found, for the first time, that she was having a hard time accommodating her surroundings to the belief that she was in the middle of a deportation action. She frowned with confusion. Something was wrong.

There were quite a lot of man-made structures in the tunnel. In fact, she soon found herself walking through a hallway with straight walls and flat floor and ceilings, built here for no purpose she could fathom. She was quickly getting breathless in the thin air, but the men pulling her along didn't slow until they had taken her through an ordinary door into an office, with a desk behind which a uniformed man was sitting. This man nodded to the men holding Rachel, rose and knocked at another door directly behind him. A voice answered from within, and the men with Rachel took her through.

Behind an impressive desk in the inner office, a large man with a heavily bemedalled uniform had been sitting. The star on his uniform shoulder suggested to Rachel that he was a general, if military insigniae here were the same as in the U.S. The man, the general, was now rising from his comfortable-looking chair. At a gesture from the general, the men who had brought Rachel here untied and removed her gag, unlocked her handcuffs, deposited a bag they had carried in with them on the general's desk, saluted the general crisply and left.

Rachel rubbed her chafed wrists and worked her jaw to loosen it. She couldn't understand this at all. She took a deep breath and began speaking to the general. "I demand to know what you're going to do with me!"

The general smiled and held up both hands in a calming gesture. "There is no need for such a tone. You are Miss Rachel Preston, are you not?"

Rachel gasped, relief flooding her. After all this time, finally someone in this country who spoke English! "Why am I here? When are you going to deport me?"

The general raised an eyebrow. "Deport you? What gave you that idea?"

Rachel felt a sudden chill in the pit of her stomach. Something was very wrong.

She tried to speak without her voice shaking. "I am an American citizen. You know you have no right to treat me like this. I demand to talk to the American ambassador!" She folded her arms across her chest, her best available way of looking obstinate.

The general smiled again and shook his head lightly. He opened the bag the men had left behind on his desk, searched briefly and removed a small booklet, flipping it open. Rachel gasped. She could see her picture in it, and recognized it as her passport. The general's smile tightened, looking more threatening. "Does this make you an American citizen?"

She looked at him, not sure what to say. "No, I... I mean yes!" She felt she might be falling into a verbal trap of some sort.

"I will take care of that, then." He picked up a cigarette lighter, and set fire to the passport.

Rachel gaped in shock. "You can't do that! It's..." She reached out for the passport, jerking her hand back from the heat of the flames.

The general dropped the burning passport into a bowl, where it gradually turned to smoldering ashes. "There. You are no longer an American citizen. You are simply a convicted spy."

Rachel opened her mouth, but found no words could come out. She couldn't breathe. Her heart pounded wildly. They weren't going to deport her! They would... what do you do with spies? Were they going to... oh God, would they execute her??

The thought at last came to Rachel, filling her with relief, that Mandy was still out there, perhaps still in the hotel room, perhaps on her way now to the embassy. Mandy would tell them at the embassy, within hours, that Rachel was missing, possibly arrested. Rachel would probably be here only a day at the most, until someone from the embassy came to claim her. It seemed unlikely, as she began to calm and to work through the situation more rationally, that these people would execute her immediately. If they wanted to do that, they had no reason to take her on such a long trip. This was clearly a prison or fortress of some kind, where they intended to hold her for a time -- and that would give the U.S. embassy time to work on freeing her. Regardless of what Rachel's sentence was, there was no way the local government would stand up against demands by the U.S. to release one of its citizens. Rachel gritted her teeth in distaste, but told herself she could stand it for a day. The shock at her treatment began to subside. I'll be out of here soon, she said to herself repeatedly, like a mantra. I need to try to remember everything that happens to me so I can tell people at the U.S. State Department. To do that I need to stay calm.

The general reached down and pushed a button on his desk. Seconds later a squad of three men entered the room, their eyes bright with excitement. They quickly surrounded Rachel and pushed her back out into the outer office, and through another door at the side of the office.

Rachel was terrified, and with horror she registered the contents of the room: little shelves holding what looked like steel cuffs, hooks on the wall from which chains hung, other gadgets whose purpose she couldn't determine but which she feared on sight. She began struggling now, not knowing where she could run to but knowing she had to get away. She jerked one arm free momentarily but it was caught again, before she could scratch one of the men's eyes out. She screamed, "Let me go, get your hands off me -- NO!!!" This last exclamation came as the man behind her started tearing at her blouse, Mandy's red blouse, ripping it away from Rachel in shreds within seconds. Rachel took a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs. One of the men said something to another, and the second reached towards one of the shelves for something. Rachel felt her head gripped tightly, and hands in front of her face pushed something into her mouth -- she saw, to her disgust, that it looked like an erect rubber penis. A second later it filled her mouth completely, leaving her incapable of making any sound other than a frantic "Mmmmg! Mmmmg!" She fought uselessly as the man behind her tightened the straps of the thing behind her head.

Meanwhile her clothes were still being shredded. Her shoes were torn away, and her skirt was ripped off. She fought harder as her bra was yanked off, and at last her panties came away with a ripping sound. Oh, God! she thought, now completely naked, still struggling with her attackers, I'm going to be raped!

Her heart pounded and she felt faint, then nauseous. One of the men opened another door to the room, opposite the one through which she had entered, while the other two took her by the upper arms and hustled her into the room revealed by the open door. Rachel, as frightened as she was, blinked in surprise, having expected to see a bed for her rape -- not a tiled floor and a shower. While she was still trying to process her surroundings, one of the men reached onto a shelf and retrieved what looked to Rachel like an aerosol can. While the other two men held her steady, as she instinctively continued struggling, the man began spraying her legs with the foam that emerged from the can. He continued until he had covered her entire lower body, including her mound and crotch, while Rachel shook her head helplessly and made "Mmmmmg!!" noises.

When the two men beside her held her arms outward so the man with the can could spray the foam into her armpits, Rachel realized at last what they were doing, at about the same time the foam covering her legs began stinging intensely. Meanwhile the man replaced the can on its shelf and donned plastic gloves, which he used to spread the foam more evenly so that no patches of skin were missed.

Rachel closed her eyes against tears as the stinging intensified. She opened them again at the sound of running water -- the man doing most of the work had turned on the shower and, seeing that he had Rachel's attention, gestured for her to step under the stream of water.

Rachel didn't need a second invitation. Obviously the men knew they didn't need to use force for this part of the procedure -- every girl they brought here was no doubt eager to jump into the shower at this point to wash the foam off. As she did, in water cooler than she would have liked but welcome if it would stop the stinging, her insight was confirmed. Her legs felt smoother than they should -- she hadn't shaved them since the hotel room in Berlin -- and the strip of pubic hair she habitually left unshaved came away in clumps, leaving perfectly smooth skin behind. The hair she usually didn't bother with on the back side of her labia -- all gone. Rachel wondered if the effect would be permanent.

Rachel looked for a towel, and saw none. There was nothing she could do other than stand there shivering as her body began drying.

One of the men said something and, unexpectedly, the other men gathered around, and an animated discussion began among them. It was obvious to Rachel that she was the subject of it, but as the voices went on around her, for the moment she didn't get any feeling of threat. None of the men was angry, or even especially excited, and Rachel felt some relief at that -- it seemed doubtful the expected rape was coming, at least not yet.

They did, though, seem to be discussing her body, with gestures at her breasts and legs accompanying the indecipherable flow of words, along with a nodding of heads. While Rachel's alarm decreased, her embarrassment at being completely exposed to their intense examination increased, along with puzzlement. The talking seemed to go on forever -- long enough that Rachel's skin was mostly dry, and the shivering from cold had moderated into a trembling of uncertainty. The stinging from the foam had subsided, though her legs were slightly red. The discussion seemed to be less about her body now, but still about Rachel herself in some way.

At last a consensus was reached, with all of the men nodding and making affirmative noises. The man who'd been doing all the work turned off the water, and gestured for Rachel to return to the outer room. When she hesitated, the other two men grabbed her arms and pulled her back through the door.

To the astonishment of the small rational part of her mind remaining, a fourth man in the room, who had stood patiently while she was stripped and depilated, now came towards her with, of all things, a tape measure. Quickly and expertly, he wrapped it around her right wrist, then bent to measure her right ankle, and up to her waist, then her neck, then from the front of her waist to the floor, as she stood naked, trembling, staring at him, too stunned by all the unexpected turns in her treatment to resist for the moment. The man turned away and went to the shelves along the wall, collecting several implements after examining the labels in front of them. Sizes! she thought wildly. He's checking sizes!

Returning to her, the man quickly slapped a wide, circular, hinged band of metal closed around her right wrist, securing it with a padlock. He did the same with her left wrist, and bent to put similar bands on her ankles. A chain just a foot long was locked to her ankle bands, connecting them. Another chain circled her waist and was quickly locked in place. She resumed fighting when he raised another band towards her head and began fitting it around her neck. No! she thought, not that, not that! I'm not an animal to be collared, I'm a human, don't treat me this way! The men held her firmly, and the collar was locked in place in seconds.

More chains came next. One long one was fed through a ring in front of her waist chain, and it slipped down through the ring not quite to the floor, the chain's enlarged top end stopping it from passing through the ring. The lower end of the chain was then padlocked to the middle link in the hobble chain running between her ankles. A padlock connected her wrist bands together in front of her and both of them to the chain running up from her hobble chain, at the end that protruded above the ring in front of her waist chain. At last, the locksmith, as Rachel thought of him, took a small colored metal tag from his pocket and, with pliers, secured it to the side of her collar. Like a dogtag! Rachel moaned to herself.

Rachel's mind whirled in a jangle of confusion, unable to dwell on any horrifying mental image before another one crowded in -- feeling her nakedness, seeing herself helpless in chains, seeing herself collared and tagged like an animal.

One thought ran through her mind continuously, pushing out all other thoughts. Are they going to rape me now? She wasn't concerned about the possibility of execution for the present. They wouldn't remove the hair from a prisoner's legs just before killing her.

One of the men hooked a chain to the ring in front of Rachel's collar, and used it to pull Rachel towards another door. Oh God, no, she wailed to herself, now they're going to lead me around by a leash! She frantically shuffled her bare feet in tiny steps to keep from falling as he rushed her out into a hallway. Two other men walked on either side of her.

She suddenly remembered an image that had always made her shudder: she had seen accused criminals being escorted by police in very similar bondage -- the hobble chain, waist chain with hands cuffed to it. Those criminals, though, at least had the dignity of being clothed, in orange prison jumpsuits. The image drove home to her, as nothing else so far had, that the government of a country considered her a dangerous criminal. She had never been in trouble for anything in her life, never even required to visit the school principal for a stern lecture.

Her hands joined at her waist writhed to free themselves, and she heard all of her chains clink as she did so. She suddenly found her chest so tight she couldn't breathe, and nearly fainted, as a full consciousness of just how vulnerable she was came crashing in on her -- naked and completely defenseless in her metal bondage, still gagged, she felt a helplessness far beyond anything she had ever imagined.

No, Rachel, a more calming voice said within her. Not helpless. You can't help yourself, but there are people out there working for you. They will get you out of this. Just hold on. She began breathing again.

They came at last to a long corridor, about seven feet wide, with heavy doors at intervals on either side. The men led Rachel down the corridor and stopped in front of the third door on the right, about six feet wide and perhaps eight in height, of heavy wooden planks reinforced with bands of steel across it, with a metal frame around its edges. While one of the men released two bolts on either side, which had obviously held it closed, another manned a crank in the wall beside the door and began turning it.

Unexpectedly to Rachel, the door began opening inward, not from its side, but from its top, pivoting on hinges at the bottom. It occurred to Rachel at last that the door was a drawbridge, and once it was horizontal within the room behind it, it spanned a pit that ran from one side of the room to the other in front of the door, about eight feet across and around ten feet deep. There was no water in the pit, but its floor consisted of jagged rocks that would probably seriously injure Rachel if she were to fall into the pit, and it would be impossible to climb out, probably even with her hands free, let alone shackled as she was.

The room itself was about twelve feet wide, and Rachel saw, to her shock, that there were two rows of cages, lining the walls on either side, eight cages on each side, the rows facing each other with an aisle six feet wide between them. The room was given a steady but dim illumination by light fixtures on the walls around the periphery. There was no door in the room other than the drawbridge.

This is where they're going to keep me! the thought roared in her head. For as long as I'm here I'm going to be kept in a tiny cage! Riding in a cage in the van was one thing, a demeaning but effective way of transporting Rachel as a prisoner. But prisoners obviously must live in these! The cages were prison cells.

She was led across the drawbridge, down the aisle between the rows of cells, her chains clinking all the while, and the men stopped and conferred, evidently about which cell she was to go in. Rachel wondered why it mattered, as all of the cells seemed to be empty. At length one of the men, consulting a chart he had brought with him, unlocked the door of the fifth cell on the right, and Rachel, with a heavy sigh, squatted down to scuttle into it. Any resistance, with Rachel so awkwardly chained and outnumbered by men, any one of whom could have handled her easily alone, was pointless.

The man crouched down and unhooked the leash, then unfastened the straps holding Rachel's gag. As it slid out of her mouth, she said without much hope, "Please, American citizen, please tell my government, please contact my embassy," though she doubted any of the men here spoke English. She knew Mandy must by now be headed for the embassy, if not already there, but anything Rachel could do to speed up the process of her release seemed worth the effort. Ignoring her, the man closed the door of her cell with a very secure-sounding click, and he and the two others who had accompanied him walked away, not looking back. Moments later she heard the drawbridge being raised.

Rachel wriggled into a sitting position. She pounded her feet against the metal bars forming the front of the cage, with no effect. Then she remembered the pit in front of the door to the room. Even if she somehow managed to escape the cell, there was no way she could possibly reach the now-raised drawbridge, let alone open it.

Sighing again, she quickly examined the cell. Hardly three feet wide and deep, perhaps four feet from floor to ceiling. She couldn't stand upright in it, and she couldn't stretch out to anywhere near full length. There were no furnishings of any kind, nothing to lie on but the bare concrete floor. The only features of the cell were two bowls, one of them with a little dried food crusted in it, and a cleaner one, probably for drinking water. Towards the back of the cell there was a circular hole, about six inches across. There was both a piney aroma and a toilet smell coming from the hole. With disgust, Rachel realized what it was for.

I'm in prison, she told herself. I'm in prison. Not a western prison. A hellhole prison.

I'll be okay, she thought, I'll be okay, I'll be okay. It's just for a day. Or two. Two at the most. Mandy must already be there, at the embassy.

How long will it take? she wondered. She tried to visualize what was happening at this moment. Mandy would wait until late in the afternoon to leave the hotel. She can't wait too late, Rachel knew, or she'd run up against the curfew. What if Mandy decided to play it safe to wait until morning? No, Rachel decided, she'd be frantic with worry, she'd have to get out and do something.

What time is it now? Rachel tried to estimate the time of her detention in the city, her trial, the long trip to the prison. Her best guess was that Mandy should be walking to the embassy now. She'd get there, and probably have to go through a succession of officials before she found the right person to deal with the problem. Then what? Consultations with the State Department? Discussions with the Irkhetnian government? Paperwork? Negotiations? Would there be some sort of exchange required? No, Rachel thought, the U.S. would simply demand her release. That wouldn't work in every country, but as needy as Irkhetnia was for the goodwill of the U.S., it would work here.

At the end of her reflection, Rachel had confirmed to herself it would take two days, at a maximum. Three, if Mandy waited until morning. Rachel reluctantly decided to settle on three days, not wanting to be worried if it took longer than expected. She sent her mind ahead in time, visualizing embassy officials, perhaps the ambassador himself, on the phone on her behalf. I'm strong, she told herself. I can stand it for three days. I'm not the weak, spoiled American girl. I can do it.

Svetlana had learned the trick of falling asleep while pedaling.

Or at least, of letting her mind fall into a dream state, which, while less restful than sleep, allowed her to be somewhere else. Anywhere other than here.

Her mind was in the here and now at present, recently jolted out of its reverie by a painful electrical shock inside her vagina. She had allowed her rate of pedaling to fall below the threshold, leading to her punishment. Gritting her teeth, she picked up the pace.

Svetlana saw the irony in being shocked by the very electricity she herself was generating, she and the other three women sitting on the four stationary bicycles whose pedaling provided the power for the prison complex. Though the irony didn't make her smile. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had anything to smile about.

She, like the other three women, was held in place, with straps securing her feet to the pedals, straps holding her hands to the handlebars, and more straps connected to the chain around her waist holding her in the seat -- the hated seat with the metal knob that protruded up inside her, that delivered the shocks such as the one she had just suffered. She hated being nude as well -- with the sweat constantly streaming down her body, she wished she had some cloth around her to absorb it. At least the water was replaced -- a nipple at the end of a long tube coming down from the ceiling was secured in her mouth, and through it she could suck water as needed. With her body's need for water as constant as it was, the bright spot was that she didn't need to get her liquids from the guards' penises, as the women did elsewhere.

Svetlana and the other girls were midway through their three hour shift of pedaling, the first of two today. After their first shift, the other four women of her team would take over while Svetlana and her three partners rested three hours before doing another three-hour shift -- the eight women on the team doing twelve hours of pedaling in all. Then the entire team would take twelve hours off while the other team of eight women took their turns, completing the twenty-four hours, after which the cycle would start over. And over and over, until Svetlana's team, she hoped, was rotated to some other duty.

The twelve hours during which the other team worked would not be free time, Svetlana knew. She and the other women of her team would curl up in their tiny cells, here in this same room, trying to sleep while the other team pedaled, their rest interrupted for participation in the disgusting sexual or fighting games the guards thought up. That, she knew, would be the case no matter where they were assigned.

Perhaps, Svetlana thought, their next rotation could assign them to the greenhouse again, where they had worked before -- miserably hot, sweaty work like this, but much less physically exhausting. At least, she told herself, I have that to hope for.